Saturday, May 5, 2018

DANIEL GALLAGHER, CURRENTLY OF CORNELL UNIVERSITY AND FORMERLY LATIN SECRETARY TO POPES BENEDICT AND FRANCIS, TO GIVE KEYNOTE SPEECH AND WORKSHOPS AT THE CAES INSTITUTE AT SKIDMORE COLLEGE, OCTOBER 26-27, 2018

The Classical Association of the Empire State, like the rest of the classics community throughout the country, was intrigued by the February 2017 headline in the Cornell Chronicle, “Renowned Vatican classicist joins the Cornell community,” and it is thrilled that attendees to its annual institute will not only hear him give a keynote address but also will have the opportunity to attend two of his workshops. In addition, the Institute, which will be held at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs on October 26-27, 2018, will include presentations by other professors and teachers on historical, cultural, and pedagogical topics.

In Professor Gallagher’s keynote speech, “From Taedium to Studium, from Negotium to Otium: My Voyage Across the Sea of Latin,” he will recount that, ”With the right teacher, an annoyance with textbook-Latin can be transformed into a living experience of Latin literature. I was fortunate enough to have such a teacher [the legendary Reginald Foster]. I want to tell the story of how he turned my frustration with Latin into a zeal for its literature, how that zeal led me to a job writing Latin, and how that job drove me to share Latin as one of life’s greatest pleasures.”

Along with his speech, Professor Gallagher will give two workshops on his modus docendi. In the first one, “Conversational Latin: It’s not what you think it is,” he will assert that “we cannot lay claim to a sufficient mastery of Latin qua language until we have acquired some oral skills. At the same time, unlike a modern language, the goal of spoken Latin is not conversational fluency. Rather, by formulating our thoughts into Latin and expressing them in real human-to-human interaction, we experience the unique structural, grammatical, and syntactical features of the language actively rather than passively, which in turn greatly enhances our reading comprehension.”

In his second workshop, “Ossa: The Bones of Latin,” he will display how “Reginald Foster has developed a unique and highly effective way of teaching and learning Latin. It is not a magic formula, but a new approach to building the bones of Latin through a direct “experience” of its original loci. The dictionary is the ‘textbook,’ the readings are the entire Latin corpus, and the assignments are ludidomestici or ‘home-games’. Decide for yourself if they work.”

Program and registration information will be available on the CAES website (http://www.caesny.org) by June 1, 2018.

Daniel Gallagher, currently the Ralph and Jeanne Kanders Associate Professor of the Practice in Latin at Cornell University, spent a decade at the Vatican working as a Latin secretary for Popes Benedict and Francis. For twenty years now he has dedicated himself to handing on the Latin language according to the method of his teacher and predecessor at the Vatican, Reginald Foster, a mission he shares with his colleagues at the Paideia Institute for Humanistic Study. Professor Gallagher has offered a wide range of tutorials and workshops at high schools and colleges throughout Italy and the United States, including Philips Exeter Academy and the Liceo Scientifico Volta in Milan. Among other projects, he has translated Jeff Kinney’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid (Commentarii de Inepto Puero) into Latin, and has recently collaborated with C. J. Henke on a revised edition of De Mago Oziensi (The Wizard of Oz).